Through a Textual Glass, Darkly: The Masochistic in the Feminine Self and ' Raylene Ramsay Simmons College

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the inversions operated by proliferating specular images in Duras, seeking the meanings of Emily L.'s masochistic sacrifice of her poetry to her love for the "Captain." The Durassian subject takes form in the movement between looking and being looked at. Emily L., in her indecency and closeness to death, embodies the disturbing strangeness of the perverse desire of the watching narrator, Duras. The telescoping of the dichotomies of the fearful states at the origins of writing (self-loss in, or separation from, the other) also involves a movement between a "masculine" position of desire that seeks to kill and a "feminine" position excited by self-dispossession, a position problematically valorized in Emily L

RESUME

Cet article examine les inversions operees dans les images speculates qui proliferent chez Duras, a la recherche des sens du sacrifice masochiste que fait Emily L. de ses talents de poete a son amour pour le «Capitaine». Le sujet durassien prend forme dans le va-et- vient entre le regard qu'il pose et qui est pose" sur lui. Emily L., dans son indecence et sa proximitl a la mort, personnifie la troublante etrangete' du desir pervers du narrateur (Duras) qui la regarde. Le mouvement qui telescope les dichotomies des dtats de peur a l'origine de l'ecriture (la perte de soi dans l'autre ou la separation d'avec l'autre) implique aussi un mouvement entre une position «masculine» de d6sir ou Ton cherche a tuer et une position «feminine» ou Ton cherche la d£possession, position valorise* de faoon problematique dans Emily L

X RADmONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AS ELAINE Marks At the very beginning of L'Amant, Duras, succinctly recapitulates in her discussion of the sig• addressed as "vous," chooses, somewhat discon• nificant origins of the genre,1 arises in the narcis• certingly, to see herself through the gaze of another sistic project of the search for love (self-love, love —a male admirer (the brother of Prevert). Her face, for the other, the reader's love). In the recent "new however, is no longer the transparent beauty of a autobiographies" of the French nouveaux roman- youthful photograph, but is ravaged ("devaste") by ciers—works pursuing the (im)possibility of the the individualized irreducible suffering of age and return of the self in an age of suspicion and of the living, what Julia Kristeva sees, in a crucial article primacy of language—such narcissistic and libidinal on Duras, as "The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern mirrors multiply self-consciously within the texts World." This, her interlocutor tells Duras, is the to serve a number of arguably (gender) specific face that he prefers. Product of intersubjectivity or purposes.2 of the gaze of the Other, transfigured by collective suffering, the subject also sees/reads herself in the Chauvin, her factory worker interlocutor, meet in a mirror as monstrous and a fond object of time's bar of the Northern port to reconstruct the story of "brutality." ("j'ai vu s'operer ce vieillissement de the crime passionnel to which they have been wit• mon visage avec I'interet que j'aurais pris par ex- ness from the probing of the other's inner life and emple du deroulement d'une lecture" \ "I saw this desires. The setting, the character set, and the cen• aging of my face take place with the interest I tral movement of Emily L. that telescopes the in• would have taken, for example, in the unfolding of dividual and the collective, mirroring self in the a reading" [10].) Other in intersubjectivity and working against the high textual self-consciousness through the prolif• These specular and textual images, Durassian eration of doubles, are already present here. So, inversions, and juxtaposition of opposites frustrate too, is the oscillation between a sadistic conventional readings. It is a general feminist tenet "masculine" position of desire that actively seeks to that the woman who refuses to be the objectified dominate or hierarchize, to kill—Chauvin—and a "Other" of the dominant masculine gaze postulated "feminine" position excited by social/sexual by Simone de Beauvoir or Laura Mulvey must as• degradation—Anne's desire for/of the unknown men sert her subjectivity by looking (at) herself in the from the factory passing in the street—that seeks mirror. Yet being seen/seeing with the gaze of the humiliation and self-loss in alcohol, submission to outside other/lover (or indeed reader) has always the desire of the dominating other, self-dissolution been central to Duras' scheme of things. Being and death. It could also be argued that what is looked at and looking, being read and reading or already at stake in the text is the superordinance of writing the other, imply vital constant movements the writing and the violent doubling (suppression) of repeated mirroring and of oscillation (between, of life by language. As in Duras' later texts, the for example, active exhibitionism and passive voy• subordinate is valorized. eurism) that replace any static photographic dicho• tomy (seeing/being seen, self/[m]other or self/ Emily L. (1987) projects a sense at once of the [brjother) in her work. play of familiar forms duplicated or multiplied, ghosts trying out new shapes in the mirror, and of In L'Amant, which has been portrayed as a the fierce re-tuming of subordinate and repressed work generated from old photographs,3 the narrator desire in the ever more present face of death. The comments that the posed family scenes that the writer as solitary, masterful subject creating and mother has taken regularly as a record of her chil• controlling her characters continues to systemati• dren being seen are not a laying bare of a truth, but cally choose self-dissolution over self-conscious• rather a dressing up and a fixing. Likewise, the re• ness through the splitting or multiplying of femi• touched photo her mother has prepared for her nine narrative positions (the "je"/"elle"/la petite grave in the Vietnamese tradition observes photo• prostituee in L'Amant, the "je"-Duras/"elle"-Emily graphic conventions that make everyone look simi• L./"La femme du capitaine" in Emily L.) while lar and conceals rather than reveals individual suggesting the difficulties with and unreliability of identity. male narrators (Jacques Hold and Peter Morgan in Le Ravissement de Lol V Stein). It is only through Existence, like identity, must take form in the other observed and the observing of self by the response to, or in seeing/reading others, as Mari• other lover-reader ("regardez-moi" says Marguerite anne Hirsch claims in her interpretation of the in L'Amant), that is, through a circulation of desire mediations of the Durassian text. It therefore holds that I-the writer can come to speak. much of the indirectness of fiction. For Hirsch, Duras' is an enacting of such a The story of Emily L* takes shape in the re• literary process of reading—an empathetic imita• sponses of a narrator, recognizable as Duras, and tion. In this novel, Anne Desbaresdes, wife of a her interlocutor, himself identifiable as the younger, factory manager in a French seaside town, and homosexual (and thus non-superordinate) male companion of recent years, Yann Andrea, to a sec• As in Irigaray's theory of feminine speech, ond couple they observe daily in the port bar while there is no unity of the subject or possibility of on vacation close to where the Seine flows to the clear subjectivity or objectivity in this looking sea at Quilleboeuf. The narrator attributes her fas• (reading/writing). cination to the woman's abjection, the "indecency" and the humility of her continuing existence so pas un sujet qui pose devant lui en objet. D n'y very close to death. "Little lizard" ("Petite iguane"): a pas cette double polarite sujet/objet, enoncia- this fictional double somewhat resembles the des• tion/enonce. D y a une sorte de va-et-vient cription Duras gave in a recent interview for The continu, du corps de l'autre a son corps. \ not a New York Times with Alan Riding of her own di• subject which poses in front of itself as object. minished state after her treatment for alcoholism There are not those dual poles of subject-ob• ject, enunciation-enunciated. There is a kind of and recent illness. The physically ravaged other, an continual movement back and forth from the aging alcoholic isolated on her bar stool alongside body of the other to one's own. (Le Corps-a - her younger "husband," hair with graying roots corps avec la mere, 136). dyed and redyed, a "bundle of rags" with broken nails and teeth, laughing and moaning in inarticu• Self-revelation may come from this self-efface• late madness, comes to embody the "disturbing ment or displacement, "the mystery of seeing one• strangeness" (the Unheimliche) of the narrator's self as other" (249) as Sanford Ames describes in own desire. Lol V. Stein's desaisissement in the rye field as she watches the window of the hotel where Jacques Desire in Emily L.'s narrator is, most immedi• Hold (the narrator who watches her) and Tatiana ately, the sudden fierce tenderness of the need to are making love. These slippages or oscillations hold the bird-like skinniness of the dying Emily L. from one position to another, from narcissistic against herself. However, Duras' version of Love- identification (displacement/self-effacement) to Story is less simple than that popular sentimental libidinal identification (love), from mother to film, even if it, too, requires the suffering and daughter, daughter to father (or brother substitute), imminent death of the heroine to bring about the feminized minority lover to machistic hunter broth• spectator's transfiguring identification. Indeed, the er, go beyond the settling down at fixed masochis• mirror figures of desire in Emily L. could be seen tic "maternal" or sadistic "paternal" poles that as closer to the sado-masochistic images in the characterize Freudian models. feminist anti-pornography video Not a Love Story, which not only displays the social and sexual power Discussing the reversal or complementarity of imbalance between the sexes but also, inadvertent• the roles of Alissa, Max Thor and Stein in De- ly, their erotic power—their self-conscious staging truire, dit-elle, Agnes Beaudry recalls that, al• of abuse and their self-dissolving libidinal use. though it is Max Thor (and the reader with him) who observes Elizabeth with fascination, in a final Freud has argued that, in a positive Oedipal scene, Thor challenges Elizabeth with the statement scenario, the woman will identify narcissistically that it is she who, for ten days, has been looking at with the (m)other woman, her rival for the pre• him. Astonishingly, Elizabeth accepts this statement ferred love-object, the father's phallus, object of and leaves the hotel followed by her husband. For desire that the daughter must renounce. In this Beaudry, this puzzling interchangeability reminds "normal" Freudian scenario, the "feminine" position us that Elizabeth (who, like Emily L., is looked at is close to a disturbing lack and abjection. Emily and does not see) is also a consciousness. In Duras' L., for her part, is described as "the bar woman" films, too, the camera moves without motivation and "the captain's woman." This childlike "She" (1/ from assuming the look of a character to apparent elle) recalls the self-dispossession or social destitu• objectivity. Scenes beginning as the glance of a tion of all the phantasmatical, recurring figures of certain character slip to become a glance at the loss who traverse Duras' texts and weave together character. her writing and her life.5 The anonymity and ambiguity of pronouns, pal choice of subject position to become subversive. that from Moderate Cantabile on marks the slip• There is, nonetheless, a surprisingly clear favouring page between selves and others, the self seeing and in Duras' work of masochism, bias that does not at being seen, recur in Emily L. The narrator, how• first sight appear particularly subversive. As Silver• ever, now explicitly equates loving with seeing the man points out, quoting Reik and supported by the other. ("Aimer, c'est voir. Cest vous voir" \ work of Krafft-Ebbing, masochism is a requisite "Loving is seeing. It is seeing you" [139].) This element of normal female sexuality. While it may seeing/loving seems necessarily sado-masochistic. stretch the woman's subjective limits, it does not L'Amant, for example, eddies around the vortex of have the shattering qualities it has for the male who an "absent" photo in which cohere both traces of abandons his "self" and passes over into the "ene• Duras' own past and her present process of re• my terrain" of femininity. The Freudian categories membering, writing from the desiring body. This of "erotogenic" masochism (seeking pleasure in photo is the perverse one of the "little prostitute," bodily pain/being [beaten] in a passive feminine in "masculine" assertive hat and "feminine" seduc• sexual relation to the father), "feminine" masochism tive gold lame high-heeled shoes, beside the "su• (being castrated or copulated with, or giving birth perior" black limousine of her "inferior" Chinese to a baby, in which the suffering position is almost lover-to-be, on a frail ferry crossing the Mekong necessarily male and there is no necessary connec• river as it sweeps powerfully to the sea. tion between "woman" and "femininity"), and moral masochism (pleasure in ego pain where the ego is In a study of masochism and male subjectivity, beaten by the superego), as outlined in the essays Kaja Silverman argues that the subversion of estab• "The Economic Problem of Masochism" and "A lished hierarchies operated by perversion ("women Child is Being Beaten," are subtly reoriented and governing men, slaves governing freemen," fore- redefined by intersubjectivity and the subverting of play displacing hetero-sexual penetration, or defer• fixed subject positions in Duras. The woman writ• ral outranking end-pleasure) can only operate er's emphasis on masochism and its threat to the within the structuring moment of the Oedipus com• stability of the ego is, moreover, in opposition to plex and the premium this places on genital sexual• Freud's focus on sadism, where sadism's desire to ity: "perversion always contains the trace of subjugate and its combination of cruelty and sexu• Oedipus within it... always represents some kind of ality is described as "a serviceable fusion,"6 and response to what it repudiates, and is always or• where sadism is seen as simply an exaggerated ag• ganized to some degree by what it subverts" (32). It gressive component of the normal sexual instinct. can thus be both a capitulation—and Foucault, for example, sees perversion as simply extending "the Like Duras' adolescent self, the aging Emily surface upon which power is exercised" (32)—and L./elle/female represents both rejection of parental a revolt against hierarchy, genital sexuality, the authority and social caste and affirmation of plea• symbolic (Father, Truth, Right) disrupting gender, sure principle, and regressive impulse to fusion and functionality (biological and social), and binarism maternal self-dissolution, death instinct. The text (pleasure/pain). speaks of "sa lenteur noyee a se defaire" \ "the drowned slowness of her dissolution," linking I would argue that the oscillations operating in Emily of the English I(s)-land, like Anne-Marie Duras' imagined ideal image, in which transgressive Stretter before her in the estranging Colonies, or the "masculine" affirmation of self through sexual de• mi-grant mother/Emilia of Ivry in the 1990 novel sire takes place against a background of the oppo• La Pluie d'ete, strangers in a foreign land/language, site "feminine" pull towards self-loss in the matrix to the phantasmatic figures of death/bliss by sea/mother/death (mer/mere/mort), constitute a drowning that recur through the work. Like the staging of the possibility of the taking up of both young man lost overboard in the immensity of the positions—active and sadistic, passive and maso• sea on the ship returning to Europe in L'Amant, chistic, feminine and masculine, subordinate and with whom the young girl identifies, the "feminine" superordinate—that goes beyond a definitive Oedi- figures which conflate love and death are both male and female. After sounding the I(s)lands ("iles de la loudly proclaims that his meaning comes to him Sonde") in the Malaysian Seas/troubled maternal from the Other, prostrates himself before the waters ("Mers Malaises"/meres malaises) of her Gaze even as he solicits it, exhibits his cas• youth with the Captain, Emily L. spends the space- tration for all to see, and revels in the sacrificial time of the story in the self-dissolution of drinking basis of the social contract. [He] magnifies the losses and divisions upon which cultural iden• in the Bar de la Marine, looking at nothing, and tity is based, refusing to be sutured or weeping for the ancient loss of a child and the recompensed. (51) recent disappearance of the yacht's old dog, Brownie. She is the willing scapegoat of pain and Deleuze's recent study, Masochism: An Interpreta• death in the world and the ego/victim offering itself tion of Coldness and Cruely, as Silverman points to the superego's punishing oversight. This older out, goes beyond this again to radically reconfigure and diagetically disappointing Emily, in France, is masochism as a Utopian affair between a severe not so distant from Anne-Marie, in India, and her maternal mother and her son, a pact to disavow the impoverished story of abandon "to the rising tide of father's phallus and the mother's lack and to write the delta and to the oblivion to which it relegates the father out of his dominant position in both individual lives" (Bree, 275). culture and masochism.

For Marcelle Marini, Duras' work is the recog• Analyzing Freud's explanation of the beating nition by a woman of her "sexual identity" and the fantasy (boys being beaten by a male authority fig• inscription of feminine "difference" in the "stifling ure in the fantasy of the girl, who wants to be a universe" of the masculine "same" (269). Marianne boy, while the figure doing the beating is a woman Hirsch, as we noted, identifies in Duras that female for the "feminine" and "masochist" boy) from the sense of connection and receptivity and self-imagi• point of view of accounts of masochistic fantasies nation in which the ego boundaries between self and performances since Freud, Parveen Adams also and other/(mother) are exceptionally fluid and un• concludes that "Something about masochism eludes defined, which constitutes the basis for a distinctive Freud" (24). For Adams, the masochist of either female form of reading. If they are indeed "femi• sex might, in fact, occupy any of the three positions nine territories," these spaces are problematically or (the beaten, the beater, and the observer). provocatively marked by masochism. The final form of the fantasy is not fixed, either Indeed, from Duras' very earliest stories ("The in the sense that there is one form found in Boa" is a striking example), there is a recurrent women and another in men, or in the sense that mise en scene of the powerful erotic attraction of the subject occupies only one position in fanta• the dominating devouring lover/brother/other. Freud sy or in deed. (24) explains the fantasy of being beaten (the fantasy of the incestuous relation with the father repressed to Adams questions whether the terms "passive" and become both punishment and a substitute for the "feminine" are indeed crucial to an account of ma• forbidden relation) as appearing only in "unwom• sochism, denies that it is the figure of the father anly girls" identifying with the father, and in "un• who stands behind the figure of the beater, and re• manly boys" identifying with the mother, that is defines masochism as the participation in a ritual resulting from a (dangerous) negative Oedipal scenario that signifies the abolition of the father in complex. Silverman, on the other hand, analyzes the symbolic and thus also indicates a subversive the self-display by the male masochist as the exag• relation (travesty) to the Law. gerated acting out of the conditions of cultural subjectivity that are normally disavowed and the Masochism in Duras is perhaps less immedi• radiation of "a negativity inimical to the social ately a disavowal or suspending of belief in the order." The male masochist: phallus, or a questioning of the production of mas- culinity and femininity as one particular relation to nounces even her poetry for an ever-receding love. the phallus, than a "negativity" similar to that at• She is able to envisage the possibility of a new tributed by Silverman to male masochism, and in• future with the young warden ("gardien") or the deed an inversion of the negative quality — its homosexual Yann Andrea. Her looking at Emily L., validating. however, reflects something of the unintegrated states, the circulation of (masculine and feminine) In Emily's love story, "she" is the Captain's desire which is at the origins of her writing. victim. His passion is fed by her frailty. His violent jealousy of her possible exclusion of him by her The framing story in Emily L. is illuminated by writing or her otherness is placated by her submis• a short 1986 autofictional text in the Yann Andrea sion. She is infantalized, rendered speechless, pos• series, La Pute de la cdte normande. This fragment sessed, appropriated by the Captain's words ("Dar• evokes the terrors of the writing of a book in an ling ... My poor little girl" [98], "She's just like a apartment overlooking the sea, in Normandy. Re• child" [69], "She's my wife... But she doesn't know quired to participate in the book's invention, called what she wants..." [102-3]), so the Captain, claims to see/to love, Yann Andrea, Duras' male interlocu• the narrator, must speak in her place ("II faut bien, tor, slips between resistance to this love story, de• chaque soir, un peu, pour elle, a sa place, parler" nial and separateness, and complicity. (He can be [71])- read, more generally, as a Durassian reader/lover in the text.) At one moment, ranting against Duras' Writing, on the contrary, would bring about his impossible project, obscurely and obstructively dependency much as the young "gardien" falls jealous of her excessive work, Yann insults and hopelessly in love with the work of Emily, the denigrates the writer. "Vous etes folle, vous etes la poetess. This muse-lover of the poetess is not jeal• pute de la cote normande, une connarde, vous em- ous of her vocation, or her strange instinctive barrassez" \ "You are mad. You are the whore of knowledge and power like the old authoritarian the Norman coast, a cunt, you're embarrassing" "gardien," the "Capitaine." Emily L. has taken on (16). This is the shameful name/title that Duras the fatal attraction of Anne-Marie Stretter and the chooses to retain for her self/her text. Yann's anger young keeper has inherited the position of hopeless against the book, his desire to kill "9a" (the Id/ passion of Michael Richardson or, indeed, of writing/desire) prevent the writer from continuing "Jacques Hold ravished by Lol," even "as he rein• although she says nothing; ("Je ne lui disais pas vents her ravishment" (Suleiman, 112). His is now que j'etais empechee d'ecrire a cause de ses cris, et the waiting, passivity, voyeurism, and self-abnega• a cause de ce que je croyais etre son injustice a tion in thrall to the beloved. As the narrator (Duras) mon egard" \ "I didn't tell him that I was prevented herself tells Yann Andrea: "When I write, I do not from writing because of his shouting, and because love you. It is you who love me. You do not know of what I believed to be his unfairness to me" (14). it." Emily's sacrifice of her writing is interpreted by The completion of the writing becomes a race the narrator as a choice, a renunciation of this against the lover. (The latter does, however, type strength and the other's dependency in order to re• the manuscript for the writer and expresses concern main "la ou elle voulait se tenir, ces regions pau- least Duras, fragile after her treatment for alcohol• vres de son amour pour le Capitaine" \ "there ism, should die or abandon her work.) where she wanted to take a stand, these poor regions of her love for the Captain" (121). In Emily L, the questions of the battle of the sexes, of simultaneous love for and destruction of The mirrors here do not re-present, at least not the other, and of the centrality and the jealous ex• clearly. Duras, the celebrated writer, who is indeed clusivity of the love story for the woman poet that herself writing the story of the narrator (Duras) and makes her writing project impossible, self-forbid• of Emily L., does not stand directly facing the den (and yet, at least in part, defiantly or secretly woman who, in a lateral mirror, as it were, re• realized), twine through the stories of both couples. Emily L.'s intense physical fidelity unto death to conscious and unconscious origins of Duras' sexual/ the lover comes to her from her Durassian women textual body through its re-turning masochistic predecessors, now generalized. ("Cetaient des ghosts in the textual minor. femmes qui ne se separaient jamais du corps de leurs am ants" \ "They were women who would Madeleine Borgomano suggests that fear in never separate themselves from the bodies of their Duras may be traced to the intense formative early lovers" [75].) However, the suffering and violence experience of the mother's purchase of a child. The of which the "feminine" is the victim is personal• beggar-woman's self-dispossession in the act of ized. As the narrator (Duras) says to her interlocu• abandonment of her child and her replacement by tor (Yann Andrea): another "mother," accompanied by the desire for the "velvet annihilation" of death, is, precisely, for Vous ne m'aimiez deja plus a cette epoque- Borgomano, the "transparently opaque" generative la.... Et moi j'etais deja en allee dans ce projet cell of Duras' writing. There are, however, a num• dont je vous avais parl6 ce jour-la, d'ecrire ber of possible readings of such an abandonment cette histoire, retenue encore d'y etre tout a fait that Duras herself describes as "monstrous" and prdsente a cause de l'amour que je vous portais "adorable." In "My Monster/Myself," Barbara encore... Et vous qui saviez tout de ce senti• ment, jamais vous ne m'en parliez \ You al• Johnson reads Mary Shelley's Frankenstein's mon• ready no longer loved me at that time.... And I ster as a figure for the self-portrait. Jane Gallop was already embarked on this project I had argues in The Monster in the Mirror" that, in spoken about to you that day, to write this alluding to Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self, story, held back still from being completely Johnson implies mat the monster is both self and present to it because of the love I still bore mother or, rather, the difficulty of separating the you... And you who knew everything about two. Gallop reads the mother's refusal to mirror the that feeling, never spoke to me of it. (144) daughter in "good mothering," and her desperate attempt at disentanglement from the ties of mother• For his part, the male interlocutor denies the very hood and from the constitutive connections and existence of any story to tell ("II n'y avait rien entre permeability of self boundaries that for Chodorow nous"). and Irigaray exemplify the mother-daughter bond, as a positive assertion of self. "Ca avait commence par la peur" \ "It began with fear" begins Emily L.\ a "fear" that like the "pain" of Duras' earlier pseudo-diary, , Other such generative experiential cells can be associated with childbirth as with war, or the fear found in Duras' work. These might include the of the assassin brother in L'Amant that woke the daughter's sense of humiliation and defilement at heroine in the night at age 18 and set her face the onset of the menstrual flow and murderous re• aging in a particular direction, becomes invasive jection of her mother at the beginning of puberty, and multiform. This negative, passive image/indefi• evoked in L'Amant. In a perceptive study entitled nite pronoun ("sa") seems also to speak of the "The Beast in the Jungle," which seeks to identify emergence of the writing vocation. The final line the contours of the monster that roams in Emily L., insists again on the importance of origins: "laisser Carol Murphy recalls that, in Les Parleuses, Duras tout dans l'etat de l'apparition" Y'leave everything in conflates the twelve-year-old girl's entrance into the state it appeared." A journey back into remote "9a" (menstruation) as entry into both the feminine primitive regions materially imaged by Emily L.'s and writing. Again, there is a potentially primal voyages to the jagged I(s)lands, fragmented, thrown scene, present in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique up before time in ever threatening volcanic erup• and recurring somewhat altered in L'Amant, in tions and profound chasms in the ocean floor, which the body of the adolescent is stripped, Emily L. appears to seek a final facing of the smelled, and beaten by her enraged mother who suspects her sexual commerce. The libidinal effects her linguistically artful text, however, is the writer's of such scenes are intense if contradictory—revolt, diffuse, desiring, active, present self marked by the humiliation, a certain pleasure/pain in shame and in threat of an underlying eruptive violence. This self- the differentiation of herself from the mother affirmation is not so much the Hegelian (or De through the experience of improper sexual pleasure. Beauvoirian) desire to destroy the consciousness that opposes it but an impulse clearly related to The relation with the mother is hardly clarified both the sexual and writing, a sado-masochistic by this scene. Is this the scenario of the dutiful pure desire to enter a fullness of possession/ravishment mother chastising the impure daughter-whore who that takes the intra- and inter-personal form of asserts her lack of dutifulness or her social rebel• killing and being killed. lion through sexual pleasure? Or is narcissistic identification with the mother in fact the corollary Fear can be located in Emily L. both as the of Oedipal desire for the father-brother as primary fascination of the sado-masochistic relationship be• love object as Freud would suggest? Or, the mother tween ego and alter at the level of the psyche (be• a cold cruel phallic mother and stand-in for the tween ego and superego, ego and id) and in the Father's Law? Is she a rival for the love of the pro• relation with the potentially violent other or interlo• fessedly "hated" older brother/father substitute, or is cutor ("Cest de vous que j'ai peur" [50]). The gaze the relation with the mother primary (archaic or of the male lover that the narrative "I" once fol• symbolic) and the young girl's jealous fascination lowed everywhere, "wherever you went," attentive with the preferred brother and fascination with the to his needs (forcing herself even now to commu• scene of punishment an attempt to be closer to her? nicate because she knows her silence makes him I would argue for Freudian unorthodoxy and oscil• anxious), is predominantly violent and annihilating. lation between the contradictory positions of love and identification, now one, now the other (as be• Yet when this observer declares that there is tween the soft-skinned virile penis of the feminized "nothing" between them the female narrator can lover and the powerful beautiful thrust of Helene only concur. Death alone, she knows, would give Lagonelle's breasts in L'Amant). their story reality, making it "fabulous" and "evi• dent." Whose death? In Moderate Cantabile, Anne The fictional daughter's resistance to her rich symbolically plays out with Chauvin the death of family in Emily L., in her liaison with her father's the woman beaten, degraded, abject before her proletarian warden, and the autobiographical young lover, willing victim of his "crime passionnel" as girl's defiance and transgressive affirmation of her the troubling female protagonist of L'Homme assis own sexual desires or pleasure in being desired in dans le couloir plays out the masochistic role phy• L'Amant, in her liaison with an older Chinese man, sically in a sado-erotic scenario. The self-sacrifi• her subversive shamelessness, are inevitably dou• cial mother in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique or bled by figures of self-chosen degradation and Journees entieres dans les arbres, willing victim of pleasure in shame. The self "prostitution" and her profligate son, the mater dolorosa of the mur• marginalization of the adolescent (the girls at dered German soldier in Hiroshima, would lay school were forbidden to speak to her), like Emily down their life for the son. Although the fascination L.'s sacrifice of her social position and her poetic with the fixing and magnifying of the power and gifts to the Captain's exclusive passion and her powerlessness of love by death is not limited to the subsequent self-dissolution in alcoholism, seem to female victim (one thinks of the death of the little have an origin in the validating of this feminine brother in L'Amant) and, as Kristeva points out, all lack and shame. Duras' work is morbidly necrophilic, it is predomi• nantly the "feminine" protagonists who act out sce• Duras writes "organically" close to a collective narios of self-immolation opposite their immolating lost "wild country" of darkness, silence, the un• "masculine" lovers. (Claire Lannes who cuts up her known (Husserl-Kapit).7 Also sensed intensely in lover's body and scatters the pieces on trains throughout France in L'Amante Anglaise would described in Emily L.'s lost poem, "wound" like presumably be "masculine.") "celestial swords"; "pierce" the heart. Pain, violent self-overthrow and boundary-crossing (that Reik Death, for you, is "nothing" ("Mais pour vous finds particularly in male masochism) are similarly ce n'est rien" [61]) the interlocutor (Yann Andrea) equated with intensity and pleasure in the descrip• tells the narrator lost in the "despair" of her tion of Emily L.'s experience of writing: "cette "frightening love" ("je vous aimais d'un amour ef- douleur terrassante ... cette lumiere rougie de sang, frayant" [137]) that he continues to deny. It is, of dans le lieu de laquelle elle entrait seule, dans l'in- course, the case that, like the slippage between op- nocence et le mal" (99). posites, "rien," within the web of the Durassian text, operates inversions, produces new meanings. In a study of women's "auto-bio-graphy," Su• There is a parti pris of being "nothing," of speak• zanne Wilson argues that, while "man" remembers ing for "nothing" ("Je crois que je parle pour ne his past through words, "woman" remembers her rien dire" [137]), without authority, much as Emily past through her body, citing Duras looking at her L.'s poem rushes towards the "unintelligibility of own lined face, at the beginning of L'Amant, to the truth." Fear and pain, like the erotic with which support this claim. But, however seductive the the• they exist in metonymical and metaphorical relation ory of a woman's writing close to the biological along with death (both violence and self-transcen• and the lived, the use of narcissistic mirrors in dence) are similarly transformed, inverted, to ab• Duras' work to argue for a splitting of writing dia- sorb the fluid multiplicity of the unknown and the lectically into masculine words and feminine body unnamed. In the mise en scene of "feminine" ma• is questionable. Duras must "read" her face to know sochism, a characteristic Durassian inversion of it in a circulation between body and text. The ado• values and a recuperation of an apparently "nega• lescent girl, like the poetess, is a projection of the tive" feminine quality is operated—perhaps not dis• writer but at a distance from herself, controlled by similar to the writer's surprising use of the black a circulation of pronouns ("you," "I," "she"). In• Morris Leon Bollee, the luxury liner, the private deed, the Durassian heroine has been described as yacht, and the French Embassy ball, to suggest cer• floating, abstract and absent, shrouded in mystery tain human aspirations and oppose them to the lim• to herself, the very opposite of a body. She is a ited, the mass produced, or the mean spirited. face, a look, a fragile voice of nostalgia, empty waiting (Gosselin). Or like Lol. V. Stein, "ravished/ The independent poet's acceptance of her as• enraptured," condemned to live in the desire of a sassination by her lover might of course be seen to triangulation, outside herself, watching in a total represent the writer's fear of independence. Her identification the passion and the pain of lost love shame at having to die, her assuming of the shame in the love of others, she is disincarnate, necessarily for the dog who is dead, however, recall not only recounted by a masculine other. the couple's former guard dog, Brownie, but also the dogs tortured on the Kampot plain; the taking The individuality of Duras' "erotual" new auto• upon oneself of the crown of thorns, the fear and biographical text does not, then, reside in an exclu• pain of the world. Emily L.'s poetry is implicated in sive "feminine" bodiliness, although the inscription the experience of a mystical pain-pleasure in self- of the feminine is clearly intensely libidinal or, as wounding that is just such a communion with the Christiane Makward has called it, a "regression beggar-woman of Calcutta and the sorrow of the hysterique." It is also a self-conscious attempt to world. Indeed, as in Bernini's statue of Saint- capture the unconscious wellsprings of fear and Theresa d'Avila, representations of the martyrdom love. Desire is a textual (reconstruction in a sado• of Saint Sebastian, or Bataille's work (on which masochistic relation with the words in power (a war Duras has written), such a wounding is conflated between words forced to become new personal 8 with ecstatic physical love. The rays of the sun symbols and stories and a submerging by the through the church windows on Winter Afternoons, ready-made words of the other). The final passages of Emily L. conclude that formal written language for De Man has sado-masochistic implications. Le must be dispossessed and humiliated, "thrown" on Plaisir du texte presents the writer as "he who the page, "mistreated" almost ("jeter l'ecriture au plays with the body of his mother," and "jouis- dehors, la maltraiter presque, oui, la maltraiter..." sance" as the "disfiguration" (60-61) of traditional [154])' in order to glimpse the secret country from language/ nature. This does not prevent the textual which it arises/which it hides, and know what we "I" as de-facement, the name as name of the oth• do not know. er, or the writing that Duras herself describes as a "replacing" and an "effacing" in Emily L. from pro• In Emily L., the regression through the meta• jecting (and thus ultimately moving towards some phorical spaces of Duras' text and mind to an "ideal knowledge of) the writer's own bodily fear, desire, image" that for Madeleine Hage marks all of Duras' revolt, and pain. Moreover, the disintegration of work10 is both fearful and exhilarating. The origi- plot, linear time, first and third person narrative and nary scene is evoked here in linguistic terms; it is of clear character psychology, in favour of moving the scar left on the poet by the lost minimal differ• point of view, anonymous pronouns, dialogic ence, "une difference interne au coeur des signifi• drama, non-sequential verb tenses and the all- cations" \ "internal difference, Where the Meanings importance of rhythm and symbolic repetitions, is are" (114). The problematic recurring figures of itself both a de-facement and, potentially, a sub• negativity (Anne-Marie Stretter's fatal attraction versive opening up of traditional fiction. and her suicide, the beggar-woman's abjection, the absent photo of the self-affirmation of the adoles• What organizes the various levels of function• cent through a kind of prostitution, the missing ing of difference within Emily L., in its movement lines of Emily L.'s stolen poem, (le seul poeme ... around the lost/last minimal difference, is the re• celui qui a disparu [117]) double such an originary writing of distinctions between the traditional logi• space. In a postmodern world where meanings arise cal opposites of violent de-facement and fear of in the play of self-similarity and difference and in de-facement, body and text, "feminine" and "mas• the circulation of signs, outside the body, in the culine," individual identity and indifferentiation. web of (inter)textual relations, and in recursivity, The poles themselves are still organized by gender. the text can appear at the worst self-reflecting and In the imagining of the differences between Emily circular, at best a clouded and partial re-presenta• L. and the Captain, the narrator hypothesizes that in tion or false mirror-mask in which the real pres• her drinking, wandering and affinity with death, ence of self and the world appears to be endlessly "she" may be hiding from "a belief of fear," "he" deferred. In an autobiographical genre which is en• from a "murder." Linked to Duras' own childhood compassed by the "impossibility of closure and to• memories of cruelty in Indochina—bands of Asian talization ... of all textual systems made up of tro- youths taking child-like pleasure in running over pological substitutions" (De Man, 922), and which undernourished dogs on the Kampot plain—fear "veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself lies closer to an abstract vision of originary "mas• the cause" (De Man, 930), such a lost, primal culine" violence. The narrator's confession of her "minimal difference" would constitute the truth of idiotic personal fears of the unknown or the un• self. The fearful/ fierce compulsion to write and the classified in Emily L, or of leaving the house (in losing/finding of self in writing that the poet Emily an interview with Riding), are universalized to be• L. experiences, her attraction to the "empty" space come fears of holocaust ("les massacres auxquels je at the centre of the writing quest as "origin" is the m'attendais" [14]). This death of the world would, writer's mise en scene of the stakes of her literary the narrator claims, shockingly, be "Japanese"; ex• life—the lost, absolute text/meaning behind the face termination would come from "Korea." that is both goal and absence in her work. Beyond the political incorrectness of such pro• In Barthes' writing, interestingly, the "deface• vocative stances, the experience of fear evoked and ment" that is an aesthetic or intellectual category examined in the mirrors of aging, love and death in Emily L. seeks knowledge of itself through repre• down her life gain it, purified by suffering or, at sentations in the text of its own irrational origins— the least, the pleasure of anticipated future reward, individuated, tribal, and universal. To a conscious• as New Testament teachings and mystical religions ness marked by the war as by colonial occupation, profess? says the narrator, the provoking of fear (or fear of God, the night, the dead, government) is indeed The pragmatic feminist literary critic might ask "original sin." The danger from the Kampot plain, —aghast—whether Duras' work, at age 73, on the however, is that the "Asians" kill dogs as children problem of the sacrifice of Emily L.'s writing to the would, laughing, without awareness (of "sin"). Such fierce absorption of her relation with the "Captain," a fear of the unselfknowing other (he who does not is really subversive. Is this the final wisdom of the understand his/the others' hidden cruelty) that arises life and career of a woman whose writing projects in historical experience, from the outside, is inevi• are considered inspirational? Perhaps Emily L. is tably lodged deeply, darkly, in the inside, in the simply a passive product of Colonial Indochina, naked semi-aware cruelty of the self towards the Asiatic fatalism, childhood humiliation or cruelty, self: indigency, otherness and subordination to the male, and Duras a victim of the pain of the War (the Cest la. Sans langage pour se dire. Au plus conquering older brother) and daughter of a time pres, c'est une cruaut6 nue, muette, de moi a which inculcated masochism in its females. Or, moi, logee dans ma tete, dans le cachot mental taken in/by the hand of her creator, does Emily L. \ It's there. Without language to speak itself. At become revolutionary in its courageous assuming its closest, it is a naked cruelty, dumb, from and re-writing of a complex which is intimately myself to myself, lodged in my head, in the mental dungeon. (51) part of women's lives; in an active seeking of a more self-aware but finely wrought approach to the References to the historical marks left by the human psyche that prefers the feminine position Colonies and the War, confession of her own irra• and more fluid, mobile ways of mistreating and tional or alcohol-induced fears and prejudices, and thus disturbing the old words and old worlds? intimation of the sado-masochistic relations of ego and alter within the psyche, "The Koreans," as the It is evident that the gap between Anglo- interlocutor guesses, is also an embryonic book American pragmatic feminist theory concerned with {"Les Coriens, c'est un titre de livre" [50].) In spite reclaiming for women the strength, visibility and of the "imbecility" of her fear and even of the pro• authority that men have enjoyed, and the French ject itself, this writing of fear may protect from "a writings attempting to deconstruct that difference11 certain fear" (55). At a more abstract level, the play or revalorize feminine positions, has not narrowed of fear of difference (the slant-eyed, crew-cut with this autofiction. As Lacan said of Lol and group of Koreans "of the night" with their "cruel" might have said of Emily L. or indeed of Duras, enigmatic smiles sitting in the French bar) with the "Etre comprise ne convient pas a Lol, qu'on ne fear of sameness (the indefinite multiplication of sauve pas du ravissement" (Lacan, 135, qtd by the self-similar Asians advancing imperceptibly Suleiman, 13). However, as Susan Suleiman says, from the forest towards the empty square) might in the context of a critique of the project of psy• create a space beyond simple fear in a meaning- choanalytic mastery confounded from within by creating circulation of love and hate, sameness and problems of transference, this Achilles heel is a difference, self-assertion and self-effacement. good thing:

The apparent eroticization of the self-depreca- Insofar as ... to be vulnerable, to be open to the tion that constitutes a characterization of the "femi• risk of pain and death is the sign of being hu• man. For a long time and in very specific ways, nine" writer by her apparently timeless masochism it has been the additional sign, in our culture, of and her identification with the world in its fear and being a woman. (116) pain is problematical. Will, indeed, she who lays Although it is difficult and perhaps dangerous to translate Duras' intense, intangible, poetic universe of fragmented states ("etats successifs sans liens" [56]) to the prose of everyday practice and politics,12 I would argue that the complex re-writing of the feminine masochistic relations with the masculine sadistic Other in interchangeability and intersubjectivity, revealed in a textual glass, and thus necessarily darkly, telescoped13 with the "seeing" (loving) of the pain of the world, is presented in Emily L. as the best hope for the survival of the poetess without either her self-accepting assas• sination or the loss of the origin and well-springs of her passion.

NOTES

1. Elaine Marks' article is a reflection on the search for love and "sold" into prostitution by the shamed mother), who as a common aspect of the most significant French autobi• both re-appear in L'Amant. ographies of the twentieth century. Marks focuses particu• 6. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id. Trans. Joan Riviere larly on Gide's Si le grain ne meurt (1920), Genet's and James Strachney. (New York: Norton, 1962) 31; quot• Journal du voleur (1949) and Simone de Beauvoir's ed from Silverman, 34. Memoir es dime jeune fille rangee (1958). 7. In her interview with Duras, Husserl-Kapit attempts to read 2. In Robbe-Grillet's autobiographical fiction Le Miroir qui Duras' women characters as "mobile, independent, aware, revient (1984), the "self" that re-turns is a phantasmatical active, and rebellious" and "all your male characters as and hybrid figure of the Father: the Comte de Corinthe, immobile, dependent, unaware and passive." Duras protests: war-hero and Nazi collaborator and traitor, in battle with "I don't see where you find this activeness of women" death and dissolution and "the marine monster who de• (426). Although Duras refuses "authority" or "masculinity" vours little girls." In the "returning mirror," Corinthe (or a to describe her female characters, she does accept that self-conscious Robbe-Grillet) distances, while simulta• women have "a power that is almost involuntary ... it isn't neously recalling, the feminine figures object of his sadc— directed." erotic sexual phantasies. 8. The links between mystical experience and masochistic 3. The very sensitive video presentation of L'Amant made by sexuality are touched on in an interview with a former Thames Television for the South Bank Show, for example, Carmelite nun that Duras published in the collection of es• uses old photographs to accompany readings of the text. says, Outside. Duras asks whether the sisters are aware of 4. This protagonist re-assembles the leitraotive of Duras' the sexual sublimations present in the masochistic rituals of earlier work. An absolute passion for her father's warden penance by group flagellation in the darkened church, ("gardien") has lead this young English woman living on rituals described by her interlocutor, which clearly fascinate the Isle of Wight to break with her wealthy parents. Sacri• Duras. ficing her poetry to her lover's jealousy, she follows him 9. This is perhaps a re-writing of Barthes who in SIZ affirms on a yacht travelling the world, returning periodically to the need to mistreat ("maltraiter") the unified traditional the security/prison of her estate (the house, the garden) text, to silence it ("lui couper la parole" [15]), although, as after the death of her parents, waiting/passing time. Emily Susan Suleiman points out in Subversive Intent, Barthes, L.'s rebellion against parental and societal norms in her significantly, reverses the traditional gender coding to see uncompromising physical passion, the pain of the impossi• the classical, readable text as replete or pregnant mer/mere ble loss of a child at birth, ennui, the search for absolute and feminine and the new decadent, fluid, plural unreadable love, the excesses of madness and of alcoholism that man• "fragment" as masculine. Are the aggressions of the female ifest and intensify the fascination with serf-loss and death, writer against the body of her text the same as for the are common both to Duras' fictional characters and to the male? Duras does not so clearly gender code the language narratives of her own life (L'Amant, La Douleur, Yann to be "maltreated" as Barthes. Does she in fact echo what Andrea's M.D.). Suleiman sees as Barthes' "homosexual" preference or does 5. The mad beggar-woman of Calcutta of , driven she move into new regions—of, for example, the entre- from home by the shamed mother, is connected to the deux? barefoot mother from Savannahkat who abandons her 10. Fear is interwoven with exaltation in the assemblage of in- child, and to "the little prostitute from Sadec" (also beaten tertextual material metaphors to create the places of Emily L: in the frail ferries and fragile cross-hatched white or symbolic) maternal, between feminine and masculine, guard-rails and the great sea-going tankers against the sadistic and masochistic. gulf of the ink-blue river Seine flowing strongly to the 12. Poetically, Duras' text moves beyond the traditional love sea; the gulls free-flying in the lyricism of the wind of the stories in her quest for love into very powerful women's summer evening and the chasm of the channel below; the territories. Politically, the attitudes of Duras' female protag• smooth surfaces of the Seine and its concealed turbulent onists have also been seen as strength. Germaine Bree con• flow; the brilliant sunlight pouring out from behind storm tends that whereas Anne-Marie Stretter lets the human clouds and the passage from sunlight into the dark sunless misery, the primal disorder, the death of European history spaces that enclose the narrator in the forest near that is India (like the cruelty that is Asia in Emily L.) flow Quilleboeuf. through her like the river itself, the Vice-consul's intolera• 11. As Susan Suleiman points out, Kristeva's semiotic (mater• ble knowing of the horror leads him to seek a violent dou• nal) theory (in Des Chinoises) posits the virtual impossibi• ble destruction, firing on his own image in the mirror but lity for a woman to give up "paternal legitimation" as cre• also on the innocent lepers of Lahore. As in Sarraute's re• ative male writers are able to do without falling into mad• cent Tu ne t'aimes pas, the "weakness" of guild for the ness or suicide. Kristeva argues that, while the support of ignored outstretched arms of the poor and suffering in the the mother can enable the rebellion against the authority of world and the recognition of the need of the other's love the father for the male, the only possibilities for the female seem, in the final instance, to be less damaging than the are acceptance of the father's Law or dangerous regression "power" of knowledge and self-love. to the archaic mother. It could be argued that Duras does 13. I discuss the "telescoping" of history and personal story "create" her own subject position in her invention of, and and the consequent redefining of genre in dialogue with, a double close to madness, suicide or death "Autobiographical Fictions: Duras, Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet (the "mendiante," Lol, Emily L.), or in the oscillatory and Simon Rewriting History, Story, Self," a forthcoming movement of regression to and distance from the (archaic paper in The International Fiction Review.

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